1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting apparatus including a piezoelectric element which includes a first electrode, a piezoelectric layer, and a second electrode and changes a pressure in a pressure generation chamber which communicates with a nozzle orifice.
2. Related Art
As a representative example of a liquid ejecting head mounted on a liquid ejecting apparatus, there has been disclosed an ink jet type recording head where, for example, a portion of a pressure generation chamber communicating with a nozzle orifice ejecting ink droplets is configured as a vibration plate, and by deforming the vibration plate with a piezoelectric element, the ink in the pressure ejecting chamber is pressed to eject the ink droplets from the nozzle orifice. As a piezoelectric element mounted on such an ink jet type recording head, there has been disclosed a piezoelectric element which is configured by interposing a piezoelectric layer made of a piezoelectric material having an electro-mechanical conversion function, for example, a crystallized dielectric material between two electrodes, for example, wherein a piezoelectric material layer is uniformly formed on the entire surface of the vibration plate by using a film formation technology, and the piezoelectric material layer is cut out in a shape corresponding to the pressure generation chamber by using a lithography method, so that the independent piezoelectric element is formed in each pressure generation chamber.
High piezoelectric characteristic (strain amount) is required by the piezoelectric material used for such a piezoelectric element. As a representative example of the piezoelectric material, there is a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) (refer to JP-A-2001-223404).
However, since the aforementioned lead zirconate titanate contains Pb, it may cause environmental problems. Therefore, a piezoelectric material in which a contained amount of Pb is suppressed has been required. In addition, as a piezoelectric material in which no Pb is contained, there are various materials such as BiFeO3 having a perovskite structure expressed by ABO3. However, in comparison with the lead zirconate titanate, such a material has a problem in that the strain amount is small.
Therefore, instead of the ferroelectric material such as PZT, an anti-ferroelectric material of which the strain amount is increased due to the electric field induced phase transition is considered for use. However, since the anti-ferroelectric material may not be driven at a voltage equal to or lower than a predetermined voltage and the strain amount thereof may has no linearity with respect to the voltage, a small amplitude vibration is difficult to generate. Since the behavior of the piezoelectric element using anti-ferroelectric material is different from that of the piezoelectric element using the ferroelectric material, there is a problem in that a desired amplitude is difficult to generate in an ink jet type recording apparatus in the related art.